Creating Your Content Marketing Strategy? Do This First.

Seven Steps to Website Audit Success (with Free Template)

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Philip Mandelbaum
06/18/2022

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Right now, as we ‘speak,’ there are pages and posts on your website damaging your search rankings and your brand reputation. There are also pages and posts on your website collecting dust when they could be generating new customers and distinguishing you from your competitors. How do I know? Because your competitors do too. Everyone does (unless they built their site yesterday). What separates the strategic, forward-thinking organizations from those that just jump on the latest trends is the understanding that: not every (content) marketing project is glamorous, but every (content) marketing project contributes to ensuring successful implementation of your (content) marketing strategy. One of the least enchanting — but most essential — content marketing responsibilities is the website audit. And it’s not a one-person job.

Whether you’re devising your company’s first content marketing strategy or going back to the (digital) whiteboard, you need to include a step for auditing your existing content. In Your Guide to Crushing the Competition with Killer Content Marketing, I break down all the steps you’ll need to take to develop and implement your strategy; here, I hone in on step four.

Step 4: The Website Audit

Once you’ve brainstormed and finalized who you’re targeting and what you hope to achieve with your content marketing, it’s time to look back at what you’ve already created to determine whether any existing content is holding you back or providing value inconsistent with its potential.

While the primary focus of your audit should, obviously, be your website, site-hosted gated content and any additional organic landing pages (and thank-you pages), it is also common practice to include one or more of the following content/distribution types:

Paid landing pages and thank-you pages
Social media posts
Email sequences, automations and blasts
SMS/MMS sequences, automations and blasts
Ads (copy/design)
Videos hosted on the site or uploaded to YouTube or Wistia

Throughout this step-by-step guide, and starting with the initial website crawl, I focus mainly — though far from entirely — on your website and other owned properties; you can follow similar — but not identical — processes for collecting and analyzing your non-site content.

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1. Assign Project Roles and Responsibilities

As with any digital marketing project, for your website audit you need to assign roles and responsibilities — and you have to do it first. Here are the 15 roles I’ve typically assigned (or seen assigned):

Senior Project Manager, the experienced team member who will assign the remaining roles and responsibilities, establish due dates and review/approval processes, customize my Website Audit Template, build out the project and assign tasks in your project management software, oversee the team and keep everyone on task, and schedule team checkins, periodic reviews and presentations to senior management
Senior Strategist, the experienced team member who will lead the ‘strategy working group’ dedicated to data analysis and the development of new marketing strategies and tactics based on the audit results (in collaboration with all the specialists)
On-Site/Off-Site SEO Specialist, the specialized team and strategy working group member who will implement all the recommended non-technical on- and off-site SEO improvements stemming from the forensic website crawl and the brainstorming sessions of the strategy working group; they will also collaborate with the Content Creation/Editorial Specialist on SEO titles and meta descriptions
Technical SEO Specialist, the specialized team member who will manage all the website crawls, add all the performance metrics (KPI data) to all the website audit spreadsheet tabs, and implement all the recommended technical SEO improvements in collaboration with the Web Design/UX Specialist
Web Design/UX Specialist, the specialized team and strategy working group member who will implement all the user-facing non-text website updates stemming from the brainstorming sessions of the strategy working group
Senior Content Creation/Editorial Specialist (or Content Marketing Manager), the experienced, specialized team and strategy working group member who will lead the creation/updating of all the necessary SEO titles, meta descriptions and white paper abstracts, delete all the webpages, landing pages, thank-you pages, articles and other web content marked “Kill” (see below), update all the content marked “Refresh,” update the Editorial Calendar with the strategy working group’s new content ideas, and create and publish new content to address the gaps and opportunities identified in the analysis of the website audit
Senior Social Media Specialist (or Social Media Marketing Manager), the experienced, specialized team and strategy working group member who will delete all the social media content marked “Kill,” update all the existing editable social media content marked “Refresh,” update the Social Media Calendar (and social media marketing platform schedule, if necessary) with the strategy working group’s new social media content ideas, coordinate with influencers, customers and the CX team to create new influencer- and user-generated social media content, and create and post new social media content to address the gaps and opportunities identified in the analysis of the social media marketing sub-audit
Senior Email/SMS Marketing Specialist (or Email Marketing Manager), the experienced, specialized team and strategy working group member who will guide the Email/Text Auditor in using your CRM, delete all the email and SMS/MMS sequences, automations and scheduled periodic blasts (e.g., newsletters) marked “Kill,” update all the email content marked “Refresh,” update the Email/SMS Marketing Calendar with the strategy working group’s new email and SMS/MMS marketing ideas, and create and implement/schedule new email and text sequences, automations, scheduled blasts and oneoffs to address the gaps and opportunities identified in the analysis of the email marketing sub-audit
Senior Digital Advertising Specialist (or Digital Advertising Manager), the experienced, specialized team and strategy working group member who will guide the Ads Auditor in using your digital advertising networks and platforms, turn off all the ads marked “Kill,” update and re-run all the ads marked “Refresh,” update the Digital Advertising Calendar (and any ad network-/platform-specific schedule) with the strategy working group’s new digital advertising content ideas, develop new digital advertising campaigns and content to address the gaps and opportunities identified in the analysis of the digital advertising sub-audit, and coordinate with the Senior Content Creation/Editorial Specialist on improving paid landing and thank-you pages
Website Auditor, the junior team member who will review every public web page and piece of ungated web content (e.g., blog posts), marking the website audit spreadsheet as necessary and leaving recommended changes in the Notes column
Gated Auditor, the junior team member who will review every paid and organic landing page (pages with forms or buttons designed and optimized for lead generation) and piece of gated content (e.g., white papers and guides), marking the website audit spreadsheet as necessary and leaving recommended changes in the Notes column
Social Auditor, the junior team member who will review every social media post for their video, graphic, gif and photo embeds, text, links, hashtags and account tags, as well as the date and time of posting, marking the website audit spreadsheet as necessary and leaving recommended changes in the Notes column
Email/Text Auditor, the junior team member who will review every email sequence, email automation, scheduled email blast and one-off email scheduled or sent, as well as the dates and times of their distribution, marking the website audit spreadsheet as necessary and leaving recommended changes in the Notes column
Ads Auditor, the junior team member who will review all the ads for each of the 10 types of digital advertising you use, marking the website audit spreadsheet as necessary and leaving recommended changes in the Notes column
Video Auditor, the junior team member who will review all the videos hosted on your site and uploaded to YouTube and Wistia, marking the website audit spreadsheet as necessary and leaving recommended changes in the Notes column

For smaller teams, assign the auditing duties to the respective specialists.

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2. Create Your Website Audit Spreadsheet

Before you can review your existing content, you need to formalize processes for collecting, displaying and reporting on the data. The data collection stage kicks off your audit; reporting, of course, takes place after your first audit is complete, and then after each proceeding audit until the project is complete. And here’s how to capture and display the data.

First, open Google Sheets (or your preferred spreadsheet app), create a new sheet, and title it “Website Audit - [date].” Then, create separate tabs for the six sub-audits:

Website
Gated
Social Media
Email/Text
Ads
Videos

Finally, under each tab, build out your columns for all the pertinent information. For your website pages and site-hosted content, include:

Title of page/post
Date
Time
Meta description
Primary keyword
Secondary keywords
URL
User persona
Funnel/Lifecycle stage
Gated/Ungated
Evergreen/Limited/Expired
CTA (Yes/No)
KPI: Acquisition: Users (or New Users)
KPI: Acquisition: Sessions
KPI: Behavior: Bounce rate
KPI: Behavior: Pages per session
KPI: Behavior: Average session duration
KPI: Conversions: Goal completions
KPI: Conversions: Goal completion rate
Notes and Suggestions (e.g., “there is a CTA, but it links to a 404 page; recommend linking to [page URL] instead”)
Keep/Kill/Refresh

(For the other tabs, you’ll need to remove and add certain columns; for email, for instance, you don’t need the column for meta description but you’ll need to add one for the email preview line. See step 4 on crawling ‘everything else.’)

What’s “Keep/Kill/Refresh?”

The reason for this entire initiative — whether each page, post and piece of content should be:

Kept, as is
Killed, or removed
Refreshed

What does “Refresh” mean?

It means the content offers value, but not as much as it could; for any row labeled “Refreshed,” add at least one recommended improvement to the “Notes and Suggestions” column. Examples include:

Remove date references and adjust copy to make evergreen
Add keyword to title and headers
Add alt-text for the images
Missing schema markups
Broken hyperlinks
Missing CTA
CTA not appropriate for funnel/lifecycle stage
Tone/Voice inconsistent with brand style
Tone/Voice inconsistent with user persona

Once you’ve made these changes and allowed a predefined period of time to elapse, you can conduct a second audit to measure the effect of the changes (and confirm all other SEO issues have been addressed). But first, of course, you need to run your initial crawls.

3. Crawl Your Website

For the full list of all your website pages — along with a deep, forensic, technical analysis of your website SEO — use SEO Spider from Screaming Frog. I’m not the only endorser. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is used by Apple, Amazon, Disney and Google; it’s also been featured in articles by Moz, a popular SEO analysis tool; Yoast, the leading SEO plugin for the world’s most popular CMS; and Search Engine Land and Search Engine Watch, two content publishers focused entirely on search engine optimization.

With SEO Spider you can crawl your website instantly and analyze the results in real time, as well as:

Find and bulk export broken links (404s) and server errors
Find temporary and permanent redirects and identify redirect chains and loops
Find duplicate URLs and partially duplicated elements including page titles, meta descriptions and headings
Identify pages with insufficient content
Analyze page titles and meta descriptions, identifying those that are too long, too short, missing or duplicated elsewhere on your site
Evaluate and illustrate your internal linking and URL structure using interactive crawl and directory force-directed diagrams and tree graph site visualizations
Create XML Sitemaps and Image XML Sitemaps, with advanced configurations to include last modified, priority and change frequency

But that’s not all: SEO Spider allows you to monitor your progress by identifying and tracking SEO issues and opportunities, generating comparisons between crawls, and comparing staging against production environments using advanced URL mapping. This can be huge in supporting your site auditing and enhancement efforts, as well as in the ongoing analysis, iteration and optimization of your custom content; be sure to notate your findings in your project management software and/or a progress tab in your shared website audit document (here’s an exclusive free template!).

The free version of SEO Spider allows you to crawl 500 URLs; with a license from Screaming Frog, there’s no URL limit — and there are additional features, including Google Analytics, Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights integrations, as well as:

Crawl configuring and saving
Near duplicate content identification
Custom robots.txt analysis and directive following
AMP crawling and validation
Structured data crawling and validation
Spelling and grammar checks
Page speed analysis

Once you’ve completed your crawl:

Export the report
Copy and paste the URLs, page titles, meta descriptions and any other relevant information into your Website Audit Spreadsheet (here’s a free template), on the website tab

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4. Crawl Everything Else

After adding all your on-site content to your Website Audit Spreadsheet, you need to pull similar lists from your off-site content for their respective Google Sheets tabs.

For your landing pages, refer to your lead capture/conversion optimization tool
For your ads, refer to your advertising networks and platforms
For your organic and paid social media posts, refer to your social media marketing platform or the respective social media platforms
For your videos, refer to YouTube, Wistia, Vimeo or whichever other video hosting service you use
For your emails, refer to your CRM
For your texts, refer to your CRM or SMS marketing platform

For each of these content formats (and spreadsheet tabs), you’ll need to determine the specific criteria upon which you’ll base your decisions to keep, kill or refresh. For a paid landing page, for instance:

You’ll need to ensure it’s set up as Noindex, Nofollow (so it’s not crawled by Google), it contains a page title and H1 header, and the download form appears prominently and above the fold
You will need the date of publication, but not the time (which is only relevant to email/SMS and social media), unless you have a massive on-site blog or blog RSS audience
Since it’s not being crawled, your landing page does not need SEO keywords or a meta description; it should, however, still contain image alt text — because the alt text is read aloud to users by screen reader software and is displayed in place of the images if the images fail to load
Click-through and goal-completion rates are the most important KPIs (but are not applicable at all to top-of-funnel pages without a trackable goal, like a form completion)
There’s no reason to track the pages-per-session KPI since the only goal is the form completion (or other action) — and not whether the page inspires users to click around your site
The timeframe for use is based on the length of the campaign for which the page was created (unlike pillar pages, for example, which should always be evergreen)

5. Fill in the Blanks and Add the Analytics

Once all your content has been added to your spreadsheet, it’s time to fill in all the missing information, including performance data (e.g., from Google Analytics, for web content) and notes.

Your technical SEO Specialist should add all the metrics. Each of your auditors, meanwhile, should complete the rest of the fields under their respective tabs, repeatedly asking themselves these 11 essential questions:

Is it up to date?
Is it optimized for search?
Is it evergreen?
Is it well organized and easy to read?
Is it grammatically correct and in line with brand style?
Is it dynamic, and does it look and function as intended on desktop, tablet and mobile?
Does it load quickly?
Does it meet the requirements for the intended stage of the customer lifecycle or sales funnel?
Does it have a clear target audience?
Does it include appropriate, illustrative videos, gifs, photos or graphics?
Does it include an appropriate and persuasive CTA?

By answering these questions, your auditors should be able to provide an educated recommendation as to whether each piece of content should be kept, killed or refreshed.

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6. Review the Data, Develop a Strategy and Present to Management

At the start of the first formal post-audit review meeting, everybody should have some sense of what to expect because of your periodic team checkins. At the meeting, each auditor will walk the team through their thought process as they worked on their tab, answering any questions the senior team members may have.

After the review meeting, the strategy working group will meet to brainstorm the best approaches to refreshing and creating content based on the performance of past content and the recommendations of the junior team members.

Finally, the team will present its findings and resulting strategy to senior management, including your heads of marketing, sales and customer experience. With approval, you can begin A/B testing, implementing and optimizing.

7. Implement, Analyze, Iterate, Optimize and Repeat

As the majority of your specialists are implementing the changes, leveraging the extended capabilities of the paid version of SEO Spider, your Technical SEO Specialist should be recording them in Google Analytics so you can better identify the sources of future trends.

Then:

Give yourself time; allow the changes to take effect (SEO, in particular, has a long lead time)
Reunite your strategy working group
Analyze your performance, and compare it to the previous period and the same period the previous year
Identify gaps and opportunities
Implement the changes
Continue A/B testing, analyzing and updating until all your content is fully optimized to serve its intended purpose
Run another website audit, starting again from scratch with the SEO Spider